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LEAD STORY: World-Class Adolescent Endeavors: Japanese engineer Takuo Toda’s paper airplane was certified in May as the Guinness Book record-holder for the longest flight from a single folded sheet of paper: 27.9 seconds. And in Witcham, England, in July, Jim Collins won the World Peashooting Championship, using a “traditional” instrument blowing at a target 12 yards away, but noncompeting ex-champion George Hollis once again drew the most attention with his homemade, gyroscopic-balancing, laser-guided peashooter, with which he won three previous championships.

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LEAD STORY: Unconventional Medicine: British construction worker Martin Jones, 42, who lost one eye and was blinded in the other in a 1997 explosion, regained his sight this year as a result of surgery in which part of his tooth was implanted in the eye. Dr. Christopher Liu of the Sussex Eye Clinic used a piece of tooth because a “living anchor” was necessary to hold a patch of Jones’ skin underneath his eyelid, to generate blood supply while a new lens formed. When the lens was healthy enough, Liu made a hole in the cornea for light to pass, and Jones feasted his eye on his wife, whom he had married four years ago, sight unseen.

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LEAD STORY: Scientology trains its leaders a good deal more aggressively than other religions do, judging by the revelations by four former church officials to the St. Petersburg Times in June. In an exercise concocted by founder L. Ron Hubbard, leaders who screw up are taken out to sea and forced off a gangplank with the admonition, “We commit your sins and errors to the deep and trust you will rise a better Thetan [immortal spiritual being].” The rituals can also take place in a cold swimming pool, with the transgressors in business suits. Also, to test leaders’ commitment, the head Scientologist, with a boombox, conducts games of musical chairs to reward the last man sitting (using the music of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality”).

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LEAD STORY: Americans Fantasize, Germans Act: Two formerly well-off retired couples in Speyer, Germany, whose nest egg was largely wiped out by investments in subprime Florida mortgages, vented their anger by kidnapping their investment adviser, James Amburn, in June. They took him to the vacation home of one of the couples near the Austrian border, bound him like a mummy and beat and tortured him over several days, fracturing two ribs, in repeated attempts to punish him and extort his own property as partial compensation for their losses. Police rescued him after he managed to send a coded message by fax.

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LEAD STORY: A 48-year-old immigrant from Malta regularly hangs out in various New York City bars, but always on the floor, so that he can enjoy his particular passion of being stepped on. “Georgio T.” told the New York Times in June that he has delighted in being stepped on since he was a kid. While one playmate “wanted to be the doctor, [another] wanted to be the carpenter … I would want to be the carpet.” Nowadays, he carries a custom-made rug he can affix to his back (and a sign, “Step on Carpet”) and may lie face-down for several hours if the bar is busy. He is also a regular at “high foot traffic” fetish parties, where dozens of stompers (especially women in stilettos) can satisfy their own urges while gratifying Georgio.

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LEAD STORY: Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City’s harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory’s highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long worms that eat wooden docks and tiny “gribbles” that eat concrete pilings.

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LEAD STORY: Competitive Facial Hair: At the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships in May in Anchorage, Alaska, four local heroes “defeated” the usually dominant German contingent in the 18-category pageant, including overall champ David Traver of Girdwood, Alaska, whose woven chin hair suggests a long potholder. Said Traver, of the Germans, “They were humble, and you have to respect that.” One defending champ, Jack Passion of Los Angeles, fell short with his navel-length red hair, despite having authored The Facial Hair Handbook after his 2007 victory. Traver acknowledged that no money was at stake (only trophies and “bragging rights”), but added that there are “a lot of ladies” who fawn over men’s facial hair. “Seriously, they exist.”

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LEAD STORY: Americans’ Special Relationship with “Taxes”: It is not just that the secretary of the Treasury owed back taxes for years, or that two other presidential Cabinet-level nominees owed back taxes. In January, federal prosecutors revealed that District of Columbia Councilman Marion Barry, who was already on probation after a 2005 conviction for failing to file tax returns for the years 1999 through 2004, and subsequently almost tauntingly failed to file a return for 2006, has now doubled-down the taunt by failing to file for 2007. And in March, a Georgia state senator proposed punishment for the 22 members of the Legislature who either owed back taxes or had failed to file returns for at least one year since 2002. The 22 were not identified, in compliance with privacy laws, but the Senate’s Democratic leader, Robert Brown, outed himself as one of the 22 in the course of calling his scolding colleague a “bloodsucker.”

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LEAD STORY: Saudi Arabia is host to several camel beauty pageants each year (condemned as religiously fatuous by Muslim clerics), but the country’s first goat beauty pageant was held in September in Riyadh, with the distinctive Najdi breed — featuring high nose bridges and silky, shaggy hair — taking top prizes. In fact, most of the goats in the competition had the same father, Burgan, whose progeny typically fetch the equivalent of $25,000 and up. Still, prize-winning show camels can bring 10 times that amount for the greater status they convey to their owners. Burgan himself did not appear at the pageant, according to a Reuters dispatch, because his owner feared that a jealous competitor would have an “evil eye” cast upon him.

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LEAD STORY: They’re either earnestly civic-minded or people with issues, but in several dozen cities across the country, men (and a few women) dress in homemade superhero costumes and patrol marginal neighborhoods, aiming to deter crime. Phoenix’s Green Scorpion and New York City’s Terrifica and Orlando’s Master Legend and Indianapolis’ Mr. Silent are just a few of the 200 gunless, knifeless vigilantes listed on the World Superhero Registry, most presumably with day jobs but who fancy cleaning up the mean streets at night. According to two recent reports (in Rolling Stone and the Times of London), unanticipated gripes by the “Reals,” as they call themselves, are boredom from lack of crime and (especially in the summer) itchy spandex outfits.

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LEAD STORY: “Genetic modification” sounds like frighteningly complicated lab work, but amateurs are routinely doing it in garages and dining rooms across the country, according to a December Associated Press report. Hobbyists (some terming themselves “biohackers”) are busy creating new life forms and someday, observers say, may turn up a cure for cancer or an accidental environmental catastrophe. The community lab DIYbio in Cambridge, Mass., has patrons who typically work on vaccines and biofuels, but might also whimsically create tattoos that glow. One amateur bought jellyfish DNA containing a green fluorescent protein (for about $100), and built a DNA analyzer (less than $25) so she could alter yogurt bacteria to glow green when it detects melamine (the substance recently discovered in deadly Chinese baby formula and pet food).

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LEAD STORY: Italian and U.K. legal authorities have recently discarded rule interpretations based on embarrassingly anachronistic stereotypes of women. In July, Italy’s Court of Cassation reversed a 1999 ruling creating a legal presumption that a woman wearing tight jeans could not be the victim of rape because such jeans would be impossible to remove without her assistance. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the British government formally removed the special, ameliorating defense of “provocation” for husbands charged with murdering their wives, thus putting domestic homicide on the same footing as other homicides. (Some husbands had received lesser penalties by claiming that their wives’ affairs had provoked them to murder.)

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LEAD STORY: The Other “Fight Clubs” Are for Sissies: At the August Dog Brothers “Gathering of the Pack” in Southern California, it was “[A]nything goes,” according to one warrior (looking to fight with “blunted knives”). A Reuters reporter witnessed two men without padding beat each other with heavy sticks and two others fight with electrically charged knives. The latter duel ended when, during a wrestling hold, one slipped a hand free and planted a 1,000-volt surge. The action seems exhilarating. Said one, “I’ve never felt better than when I’m doing this.” Another: “Honestly, I wish I could find a church with the same spirit of support and love [as I feel here].” Said “Crafty Dog” Denny, it’s “higher consciousness through harder contact.”

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Japan’s suicide rate is high, with death leaps among the most popular methods. In April in Tokyo, an 18-year-old woman jumped to her death from a nine-story building, but she landed on a 60-year-old man walking by. He suffered only bruises, as did a 27-year-old pedestrian in May 2000 when a 39-year-old suicider landed on him in Tokyo. (However, in March 2000, in Taichung, Taiwan, both the suicidal jumper and the unlucky pedestrian were killed.)

© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Medical literature reports, from time to time, patients with spiders nesting in their ears, and in May in Albany, Ore., Dr. David Irvine said that he chased a spider the size of a pencil eraser from the ear of 9-year-old Jesse Courtney (and then recovered a dead spider from his other ear.) Jesse thought the whole thing was cool and showed off the spiders in school. In a 1993 News of the Weird story, a British machinist with bad earaches was found to have a pregnant spider living in his ear, but he told a reporter afterward that he had grown fond of the spider and intended to keep her as a pet.

© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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When an evangelical parishioner comes to the altar to receive “the spirit of the Lord” and falls backward, church-supplied “catchers” ease them to the floor, usually. Judith Dadd’s lawsuit against Mount Hope Church went to trial near Lansing, Mich., at press time, as she sought compensation for head trauma and lacerations after no one was there to break her fall. (In a 1995 incident at a tent revival in Lafayette Parish, La., News of the Weird reported that the first overcome parishioner was caught, but a second, who was apparently overcome too quickly, landed hard on the first woman and broke three of her ribs.)
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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It was only three months ago that News of the Weird reported that a man vandalizing a church cemetery in Lilburn, Ga., by knocking over gravestones had one fall on him, crushing his leg and causing him to wail for two hours in the middle of the night before he was rescued. On May 6, at Calumet Park Cemetery in Merrillville, Ind., Michael Schreiber, 22, couldn’t wail because he was unconscious, with two broken legs, the victim of a half-ton gravestone that fell on him after he had knocked 14 over.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Jewelry store thieves sometimes swallow their stash at the scene to facilitate their getaway, but police now routinely wait out such suspects, monitoring the toilets until the “evidence” passes naturally (most recently reported in News of the Weird in 2001). Police in Canton, Ohio, arrested four men in March 2007, reasonably certain that one of them had swallowed a 2-carat ring worth about $30,000. After sifting through the toilets, police recovered the ring the next day, with the store’s price tag still on it.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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1) The Des Moines, Iowa, woman who was the victim in December of an Iowa Methodist Medical Center policy on disposal of amputated body parts (the woman wanted to take her toe with her): Gladys Goose.
2) The 41-year-old woman charged with assault in February, in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., after she allegedly grabbed a high-heeled shoe and smacked her boyfriend in the head several times: Kari Barefoot.
3) The name dog breeders apparently give to the increasingly common crossbreed of a shih tzu with a bulldog (according to a March story in London’s Guardian): bullshih.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Last year, a BBC News correspondent in Sudan reported that village elders in the Upper Nile state had punished Charles Tombe, who had been caught being amorous with a goat, by requiring him to pay a dowry to the goat’s owner, to endure a “wedding” to the goat, and to treat the goat as his “wife” to embarrass him. The dispatch ran worldwide and was the most popular story on the BBC News’ website for 2006. BBC News reported in May 2007 that the goat, “Rose,” which had given birth to one kid in the interim (clearly, not fathered by Tombe), had recently passed away after choking on a plastic bag.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Not Ready for Prime Time: 1) Eric Cunningham, 18, was arrested and charged with robbing a Hess gas station at gunpoint in Orlando in April, done in by his forgetting to take his gun case with him as he fled; inside was the receipt for his gun, made out to “Eric Cunningham.” 2) Jazrahel King, 29, was arrested in Norwalk, Conn., in April when he tried to use, as a trade-in for a larger vehicle, the very Jeep that he had allegedly stolen from that very Wholesalers of America dealership several weeks earlier (and which still showed the temporary plate Wholesalers had put on it).
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Connecticut state trooper candidate Jon Van Allen decided that he would have a better chance to be hired if he were totally truthful on his application and in person and decided to tell his interviewer something no one else knew: that he had on two occasions fondled an adolescent girl as she slept and that he had been duly ashamed. Van Allen was immediately rejected for the job and arrested in April based on the admission, even though the girl said when questioned that she had no recollection of any of it.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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In February, Dublin, Ireland, software engineer Michael Killian demonstrated his sideways-traveling bicycle, in which a rider sits and pedals facing perpendicular to front and back, with each hand controlling a wheel, e.g., squeezing the right handlebar and pedaling moves the bike rightward.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Aaron Hudgins, 26, and Ruan Rucker, 24, were reported missing and presumed lost inside a coal mine in Kanawha County, W.Va., in April, and after a search-and-rescue operation, they were pulled out 24 hours later. They had no time to be grateful, though, for they were immediately arrested because the sheriff said they had gone into the mine only to try to find copper to steal.
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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Principals gone wild: In February in Bethlehem, Pa., middle school principal John Acerra was arrested and charged with selling crystal meth from his office (but not to students) (and when arrested in his office, after hours, he was reportedly nude). And in April, in Lorain, Ohio, principal Robert Holloway resigned after apparently too eagerly delivering on a wager. He had bet with some boys on a student-staff volleyball game and lost, and then paid off as agreed by kissing the boys’ feet (but he was too much into it, the boys thought).
© 2007 Chuck Shepherd

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